Bertaut

If you ever wondered what the first season of might have looked like had the merely-hinted-at supernatural elements become more than merely hinted at, then The Outsider gives you a possible answer. Starting as a grim and gritty police procedural, the show takes a left turn in the third episode, before diving head-first into the supernatural in the sixth and seventh. And do these two tones mix well? Kind of. The early episodes are easily the strongest, and as the hokey horror elements start to take over, the foreboding portentousness of those beautifully constructed episodes gives way to Stephen King-isms. Relatable themes such as guilt and the paralysis of grief are dropped in favour of larger (and thus more abstract) issues such as the infectious nature of evil and the ability of ordinary people to band together in extraordinary circumstances (as I said, it's King-101). But for all that, and despite the not entirely successful mixing of genres, I enjoyed the show. I hadn't read the novel, and so I was genuinely invested in finding out where all of everything led. And even though the journey (the early stages, in particular), proved more interesting than the destination, it was a journey that I don't regret taking.

Cherokee City, Georgia. When the badly mutilated corpse of a young boy, Frankie Peterson, is found in the woods, homicide detective Ralph Anderson (the always excellent Ben Mendelsohn) immediately launches an investigation. Within a few hours, it appears the murderer has been identified, with multiple witnesses reporting seeing local little league coach and school teacher Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman) covered in blood near the scene of the crime. When physical evidence and surveillance footage further point to Terry's guilt, a bull-headed Ralph has Terry arrested in front of the whole town. As Terry's wife, Glory, (a suitably frazzled Julianne Nicholson) and his lawyer, Howie Solomon (Bill Camp; as good as he always is), scramble to understand what has happened, Terry maintains his innocence, saying he was at a teaching conference in another state on the day of the murder, a claim soon backed up by irrefutable evidence. But how can one person be in two places at once?

Airing on HBO, and based on the 2018 novel by Stephen King, the show was adapted for TV by acclaimed novelist Richard Price. Showrunners/executive producers include Price and Jason Bateman (who also co-stars and directs the first two episodes, establishing the Ozark-esque aesthetic template). Novelist Dennis Lehane also contributes scripts for two of the later episodes.

If the show has a singular standout element (aside from the excellent ensemble cast), it's the aesthetic design. Bateman, who has directed multiple episodes of Ozark, establishes a dark and gritty tone in the first two episodes, imbuing every shot with a foreboding sense of unease. Shadows abound; bright colours are muted, with greys and washed-out blues dominating; characters are often shown isolated in long shot, framed in doorways, or pushed into corners; depth of field is often extremely shallow; camera movements are methodical and slow; the editing is non-linear enough to keep the narrative slightly off-kilter (although this non-linearity is confined primarily to the first two episodes and the opening of episode nine); there's even a split-diopter used at one point to keep the foreground and background in perfect focus. The show looks every inch an HBO prestige crime drama. There are also some nice directorial flourishes. For example, in the last episode (directed by Andrew Bernstein), as the good guys are moving through a cave, they pass a body of water and we see the villain's eyes non-diegetically reflected in the water, taking up almost all of the screen's real-estate. Sure, it's not subtle, but it looks good.

Perhaps the most noticeable aesthetic element is the discordant score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, which helps the atmosphere, tone, and pacing immeasurably. Music cues are often just one deep note, held and elongated for up to two or three seconds. Oftentimes, entire scenes will be scored to these singular notes, giving whatever is on screen a sense of portentousness beyond the purely visual.

For all its aesthetic gymnastics, however, the show does have some problems both stylistic and narrative. For one thing, it's too long; eight episodes would have been more than sufficient to tell this story, and the narrative really starts to drag in episodes five and six. It picks up again in eight (which is largely a character-focused episode), but there's just not enough material to fill 10+ hours. There's also the genre-mixing mentioned earlier. What starts as a tough cop investigating a grisly murder morphs into a quirky paranormal sleuth chasing down an ancient evil, and as these two vie for space, neither genre feels fully developed. The early episodes are creepy and unnerving, with tone and atmosphere doing the heavy lifting. But as the show goes on, the horror becomes broader and less effective, and Price is never really able to fully yoke these two disparate elements into a cohesive whole.

Other problems (presumably) come from the source text, such as the first solid transition into the supernatural, which is based on a coincidence so preposterous that I was convinced the show would return to it to offer an explanation (it does not). There's also the merry band of blue-collar salt-of-the-Earth types who band together to face something beyond any one of them, a trope that King has done to death by this stage.

All in all though, I enjoyed The Outsider for the most part. It has significant problems, but it does a lot right. The aesthetics and acting help a hell of a lot, and although it's far from the best King adaptation ever made (that would remain The Green Mile), it's a damn sight better than recent efforts such as the two It films and (shudder) The Dark Tower.

Are you concerned about the alien reptiles who can take on human form and have infiltrated the highest levels of world government on the orders of Satan? What about that family member who is almost certainly a clone? Surely you're worried about your colleague, the one who is, without doubt, not just a witch, but a witch with a vampire demon inside her. What about the giants? Or the zombies in Miami? And let's not forget the fact that the CIA is a cover for a global paedophile ring, the children of which are sacrificed to Satan after they're raped, and then eaten (usually during lunch break). If you worry about any of these issues, care about your fellow man, or love the lord, then Sherry Shriner is the person you need. The earthly manifestation of God's actual literal daughter (yep, Jesus had a sibling. In fact, he had thirteen of them. Apparently), Shriner wants you to join her movement today and help fight the war for the very fate of humanity (first though, make sure you subscribe to her Patreon. And contribute to her GoFundMe. And buy some merchandise. And sign up for a recurring donation on her website).

Okay, as flippant an introduction as this is, it does serve to make a point regarding the utter absurdity, unworkability, mercenary, and thoroughly incoherent nature of Shriner's core beliefs, which posits that mankind is engaged in a millennia-old war with Satan and an army of aliens, reptiles, clones, vampires, witches, vampire witches, demons, giants, zombies, genetically engineered super soldiers, paedophiles, Meg Ryan, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift (don't ask). As cults go, her unnamed movement (they were informally known as the Orgone Warriors) certainly isn't one of the better-known ones, but as the excellent second season of The Devil You Know illustrates, you don't need thousands of followers living together on a compound to make an impact, to create pain and suffering, or to ruin lives. In fact, you don't even need to leave your house.

July 15, 2017; Tobyhanna Township, Monroe County, Pennsylvania. A woman makes a frantic 911 call to report her boyfriend has been shot. Police arrive on the scene and find that the man, Steve Mineo, is dead, a single gunshot wound to his forehead. Confused and distraught, his girlfriend, Barbara Rogers, isn't making much sense, so police bring her in for a formal interview, during which she tells them that although she was holding the gun, Steve knowingly pulled her trigger finger to fire it. Finding this explanation hard to believe, over the next seven hours, police press her, and eventually she says she killed Steve by accident. And ignoring her obvious mental health issues and her state of shock, this admission is all the DA needs to charge her with murder.

As directed by Lana Gorlitz and Zebediah Smith, the second season of The Devil You Know initially seems to be setting up for an investigation into a case of someone wrongly accused, but it instead uses Steve's death to probe the Orgone Warriors, of which both Steve and Barbara were members, before running afoul of Shriner. Active on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Patreon, GoFundMe, Blog Radio (her twice-a-week show ran for 14 years, totalling over 500 hours of content), her own websites (all 19 of them), and with three self-published books (one of which is an actual literal interview with Satan and Lilith), Shriner output a massive amount of material in which she outlined and re-outlined her wild theories. And because of the vast reach of social media, those theories were disseminated to a fair larger audience than they ever would have been pre-internet.

And, aside from Steve's death, that's the real theme of the show - much as the first season used the Pazuzu Algarad case to probe disaffected youth, drug addiction, and a broken mental health system, here, Steve's death is used as a springboard to examine the power of social media and how easily it can be used to manipulate and indoctrinate. Ultimately, the show asks the question of how could a lone middle-aged woman who barely left her house and who met almost none of her followers in person amass thousands of blind adherents all over the globe and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

And boy did she say a lot. Indeed, her claims about herself are almost as fantastical as her claims about the New World Order, the aliens who signed a treaty with the US government in the 1930s, and the war between God and Satan. So, for example, she suffered from night terrors from a young age and later claimed these night terrors were caused by one of Satan's top generals, who had been sent to kill her; she said that God began to give her visions in 1994, and in 2001, he told her she needed to use a bible code program to decode the bible, whereupon she discovered it was the end times; in 2012, she claimed she saved New York from Hurricane Sandy (which was actually a secret alien invasion intending to sink Manhattan); in 2015, she revealed that she was an angel whose heavenly name was Shazuraze, in 2018, despite originally saying Trump was an agent of Satan, she claimed that he was a literal angel and that they often worked together. Oh, and she also predicted the end of the world...every year from 2007 to 2014.

Despite rarely leaving her house, and despite meeting only a handful of her followers in person, by 2010, Shriner had gained followers in 116 countries. By 2016, her YouTube channel had 6,000 subscribers and her videos totalled over a million views. As of October 2021, there are 29,000 subscribers and close to two million total views. Her GoFundMe generated over $700,000 over ten years. The almost exclusively virtual existence of the cult is also touched on in the excellent podcast The Opportunist (2021), which aired around the same time as the show (and is well worth a listen to if you want to know more about Shriner). In the fourth episode, the podcast interviews Reza Aslan a professor of the sociology of religion, who points out how much social media has changed the nature of cults in the modern era; "a few years ago you would have to literally upend yourself from your community and your family and go and join a group. Now, you can just be the same person that you are, that you've always been, but you're a cultist. The Internet has changed drastically the efficacy of the cult. I firmly believe that if Heaven's Gate existed today, it would be a global movement of individuals, all of them linked together through social media."

The other major theme, of course, is Steve's death and the subsequent investigation, with the show very much taking the stance that Barbara's conviction for murder in the third was the wrong decision. For example, it reveals that during their seven-hour interrogation of a woman clearly suffering from shock and trauma, the police heard her say it was an accident 27 times, saying that Steve put the gun in her hand and moved it up to his head and that both of them were holding it went it went off. The police point blank refused to accept this. Eventually, exhausted and deeply confused, she started to change her story to suit their narrative (although she never wavered from her contention that the death was an accident). The show also interviews a ballistic expert, who says the evidence suggests that both Steve and Barbara's hands were on the gun, as she said, but this evidence was ignored by the police, who argued that only Barbara's hands were on it.

Another example is the prosecution arguing that Barbara would have known how to shoot because she had been in the army, whereas she was actually a supply clerk and was never trained on firearms. There's also an unfortunate interview with the prosecuting DA saying you can't make out what Barbara is mumbling to herself when she was left alone during the interrogation - cut to footage of her mumbling accompanied by a full transcript of what she's saying. And the show takes the judge to task for removing involuntary manslaughter as an option for the jury. Instead, they could only pick from not guilty, murder in the first, or murder in the third.

Things are also pretty impressive from an aesthetic perspective. This is best seen during scenes set in Shriner's home. Only two known pictures exist of Shriner, and no video, but the show features her a lot in voice over. To get around this, during the lengthy extracts from her radio show, the camera moves around her empty house as various images related to what she's talking about are rear-projected onto the walls, giving the whole thing an almost haunted house vibe. It's a really nice touch and really well done.

All in all, the second season of The Devil You Know isn't as good as the first, however, it's still an impressive documentary. The third episode in particular is brilliantly done, really making you feel just how badly manipulated Kelly Pingilley (a young believer who killed herself because she believed it was what God wanted) was and how much her friends miss her. Tightly paced, very well edited, with an excellent selection of Shriner's voice-overs and Steve's video clips, the season is definitely worth your time.

Fatih Akin, the writer and director of Aus dem nichts (lit. Trans. From Nothing) is a political individual; he makes political films and he makes political statements in his personal life. Akin identifies as a German-Turk; he was born in Hamburg, but his parents are both Turkish, having come to Germany with the first wave of Turkish immigrants following the Wirtschaftswunder of the fifties and sixties. He lives and works in Germany, and although almost all of his films are set there (the notable exception is The Cut (2014)), and all have German-funding, he considers himself a Turkish filmmaker. When he won Best Screenplay for The Edge of Heaven (2007) at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, he accepted the award "on behalf of Turkish cinema." Easily the best known/most notorious of his political statements, however, was in 2006 when he was photographed wearing a t-shirt with the word "BUSH" on it, but with the "S" replaced by a swastika. Displaying a swastika in public is against the law in Germany, and after a complaint was made, he was investigated (but not charged) by German police. He later defended the shirt, stating "Bush's policy is comparable with that of the Third Reich. I think that under Bush, Hollywood has been making certain films at the request of the Pentagon to normalise things like torture and Guantánamo. I'm convinced the Bush administration wants a third world war. I think they're fascists [...] You can apply irony to something like that. You can redefine the symbol in a politically correct horizon. My T-shirt is more than mere provocation. You have to look into the context. The swastika is not there on its own, but as part of the word 'BUSH.' One would have to be pretty stupid, not to understand that." In short, this is not a guy afraid to speak his mind.

Akin's main political preoccupation in his filmography, however, is not Nazism or American presidents, it's the experience of Turkish immigrants in Germany, specifically the racism often directed towards them.

So, with that in mind, Nichts (co-written with Hark Bohm) doesn't jump off the page as a typical Akin film - when former convicted drug dealer Nuri Sekerci (Numan Acar) and his son are killed in a bomb blast at his office, his wife Katja (Diane Kruger) has faith that the police and courts will find and punish those responsible. However, as Katja finds herself becoming more and more disillusioned with the systems which are supposed to be on her side, she comes to believe she must take things into her own hands. Read like that, this could be any number of bad Hollywood movies (the wonderfully risible Law Abiding Citizen (2009) springs to mind). However, when we include the fact that Nuri is Turkish, and that the police quickly come to suspect the bombing may have been connected to a Neo-Nazi group, it fits much more comfortably into his oeuvre. Unfortunately, it's not very good.

First of all, the film is rigidly divided into an intentionally artificial three-act structure, with each act given its own title ("The Family", "The Trial", and "The Sea") and introduction by way of home-movie footage. One of the most significant problems with the film is that the acts simply don't yoke. The first is a pretty decent study of grief, the second is a rather dull courtroom drama, and the third is a bizarrely hollow (and irritatingly repetitive) investigation into the morality of revenge. The last act mirrors the first in its use of slow pacing, long shots of people not doing very much, and sparse dialogue (as opposed to the very wordy second act), and while this is interesting in setting the narrative up in the first act, it falls flat in the third, as the whole thing ends up coming across as rather po-faced and self-important; a film convinced of its own profundity. For all that, however, up until the conclusion, I was thinking I would give it a six; it's entertaining enough, in a fairly disposable way. But then the bottom falls out. The last scene itself is actually pretty good. It's what happens next that irritated me.

This has not been an especially political film - the Neo-Nazi storyline barely features; a few mentions by police in the first act, a single scene in the second, and a couple of short scenes in the third. That's it. As Katja is the only character who is really given any degree of agency, the Neo-Nazi characters are little more than background extras (in fact, in some scenes, they are literally background extras). So this is not a film which spends a lot of time delving into issues of racism in Germany or offering insight into the rise of Right-Wing Populism across Europe. It's a revenge drama. However, as it ends, a legend appears on-screen informing the audience how many race crimes are committed against Turks in Germany each year. The film has absolutely not, by any stretch of the imagination, earned the right to preach to the audience in this way. It's almost as if Akin forgot he was trying to make something political, only remembering in time to throw together a vaguely worded statement on the sufferings of his people in an effort to give the audience something to think about. It doesn't work, with the statement serving only to trivialise the issue by trying to tie it to a film in which it barely featured, and it leaves a decidedly bitter aftertaste.